This disclosure relates generally to memory page and process affinity, and more specifically, to memory and processor affinity in a deduplicated environment.
Deduplication (e.g., Active Memory Deduplication (AMD)), also known as memory page coalescing, is a virtual technology process that minimizes or eliminates identical memory pages in main memory. Accordingly, deduplication aggregates redundant data previously found in multiple memory addresses into one memory address, which frees up memory space for future data storage.
Deduplication may be utilized for partitions configured with shared memory. When running workloads on virtual Logical Partitions (LPARs), multiple identical data may be saved across various memory addresses in main memory. LPARs may be configured to share memory (e.g., Active Memory Sharing (AMS)). The goal of memory sharing is to share memory among multiple LPARs of a system and therefore increase server consolidation. However, when the aggregate memory size set for all of the LPARs exceed a shared pool size, disk I/O may occur (i.e., physical memory overcommitment). One way to minimize disk I/O is to reduce the amount or size of physical memory (e.g., Random Access Memory (RAM)) in use. Deduplication may achieve this goal by consolidating previously redundant data found in multiple address spaces into one memory address space.